Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader spent money he hadn’t planned on spending this weekend. He doesn’t feel too good about it, but it is best that he ponied up the cash.

So, Mrs Villain has a laptop computer. It is a 5 year old Dell Inspiron. It was a fine computer for about 3 years. Then it started to act funny. About a year ago it got its hard drive wiped and s/w reinstalled. It got a little better. But for about a year it has been slow and unresponsive. (We’re talking about needing 15 mins to boot up on turn-on. MS-Office programs taking 3-5 minutes to initialize.) Admittedly, the laptop has been bashed, dropped and otherwise abused by both Mrs Villain and our children. In many ways it is a miracle that the laptop works at all.

Well… Mrs Villain needed to do lesson plans and such yesterday. Her habit is to park herself in front of the tv and watch football while doing the work on her laptop. Well… After taking 20 mins to boot up, the laptop was well into another 10 minutes to get MS Word going. The whole while Mrs Villain was complaining and carrying on. Finally, your Maximum Leader couldn’t take any more. He’s been suggesting to Mrs Villain that we get her an inexpensive Netbook or a real cheap laptop (since her computing needs are limited to word processing, internet checking and email) for months. Indeed he nearly bought an HP netbook on Woot.com a month or so ago. (At the time Mrs Villain said she could manage for a little while longer.)

Well. Your Maximum Leader packed the family into the truck and off we went in search of a netbook/laptop for Mrs. Villain. Yes, we were impulsive and didn’t research this endeavor like we would have liked. But if you only need a computer for word processing, internet checking and reading email do you really need to do a pile of research? Basically we were shopping for price.

Eventually Mrs Villain ended up with this Acer from Best Buy. She is very happy.

Of course, your Maximum Leader now wants a laptop for himself… Alas, his desires aren’t as economical. He spent the afternoon configuring various Alienware or MacBook Pro boxes. He shouldn’t tease himself like that…

Carry on.